You're looking at this in a wrong way, suggesting you haven't been paying attention to Internet business in the past year. You're looking at AOL and its acquis

You're looking at this in a wrong way, suggesting you haven't been paying attention to Internet business in the past year. You're looking at AOL and its acquisitions. Aol is an expanding company with a wide portfolio of content sites that aren't clearly branded but play to a mainstream audience. Aol has a new corporate culture and executives that know what they're doing. The line being toed right now is that they're going to be hands off and TC will just exist, but with more backend support. Great, whatever. The first thing you have to consider is in press, the tech niche especially, these sites to make overhead by playing mouthpiece to publicists from well-funded startups intent on buying their way into success. In the valley, PR people are the second scummiest people--tech recruiters are the worst. Fun fact, when you go to most tech parties in the valley the only hot girls inevitably are PR or TR. But that's where the money comes from, you play nice with PR puff pieces and you get access. You get access and you get views. You get views and you get paid. Disrupt that chain and you can't hire people to write. This has been the problem with journalism since the first cave man went outside the cave, saw a dinosaur, and had to come back to report to others. So with Aol onboard, sales targets to hit, with share-holders to be accountable to, will TC be beholden to PR more or less? My optimist side says less, because MA and crew can now focus less on tech BS and ad sales to write better stories. But my realist said says more. Because money is good and even when you try hard there's only so many stories that's interesting, so hence excess churn. It doesn't really matter. There's enough competing sites and re-telling of the same stories.